Why I'm Not a Vegetarian

So many people have attempted to convert me to vegetarianism that I decided to write down all of my reasons for refusing.

There are many different arguments against vegetarianism. One of them is health issues, as it is incredibly difficult to be a healthy vegetarian; humans are designed to be omnivores and require a great deal of nutrients which are found in meat. To stop eating meat and continue to be healthy, you must know all of the nutrients which most people get from meat and how to obtain them from plants (although most nutrients obtained from plants are much more difficult to absorb by the body than the same nutrients obtained from meat). On top of this, you must be able to afford the supplements, usually in pill form, which must be taken in order to provide these nutrients. This ties in with sustainability: such supplements are generally imported from areas in which the plants they are made from are easily grown. The use of fossil fuels in shipping them to your local pharmacy uses a great deal more energy than it would take to raise local beef, poultry, and fish and sell them at your neighborhood market, not to mention the degradation of the soil and use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides which is caused by the agricultural techniques made use of in growing those plants.

But many vegetarians are not concerned with sustainability, only animal rights. (This is unfortunate, as the two issues are inextricably intertwined.) I have often heard the argument that animals do not deserve to be farmed as a commodity for human consumption, and they have the right to live free in the wild. This argument comes from misunderstandings and misinformation. Groups who beleive they are fighting for animal rights regularly release animals who were raised in captivity into the wild, where they are quickly devoured, or starve to death. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the meat we consume comes from animals which were domesticated thousands of years ago, and have evolved over the millenia during which they have been completely cared for by humans. Without the need to feed and care for themselves or evade predators, their brains have gotten smaller and they have become slower. Many of the instincts which their distant ancestors would have used to survive have long since disappeared. They are no longer capable of taking care of themselves, and if released into the wild, they would quickly perish. They do not know how to find food and water or even identify, let alone evade, predators. They would freeze to death in cold climates or die of heat stroke in hot ones. It would be intolerably cruel to impose that life on an animal incapable of dealing with it.

And even if domesticated animals were capable of caring for themselves in the wild, their lives would not be as free and happy as the activists would have you believe. As anyone who has ever watched Animal Planet can tell you, the life of a wild herbivore is difficult and dangerous. The struggle to find food and water is constant, infant mortality rates are often 75% or higher, and death is slow and brutal.

I am not advocating feedlots and overcrowded chicken farms. I agree that it is cruel, not to mention unnecessary, to raise animals in such conditions as they are too often raised. I am a proud supporter of those farms which allow their animals to roam, and especially those which allow them to graze on grass rather than troughs full of corn. But on the better farms, the ones where the animals are well cared for and allowed to move, I see the quality of life as being a thousand times better than that of a typical wild animal.

But many vegetarians are not concerned with the life of the animal so much as the fact that we kill it. Such people would say that it is cruel to end an animal's life in this way, and it is wrong, even disgusting, to consume their flesh once they are already dead. Many would go so far as to suggest that even if an animal were to die of natural causes, it would be wrong to eat it because it is still an animal.

First off, I have to think that if the cow were given the choice between barely scraping by for its entire life and then facing the possibility of death by starvation, dehydration, or being killed and torn apart by a carnivore which would begin to eat it while it was still alive, versus being raised on a farm where it would remain well fed and cared for (and for much longer than it would be expected to survive in the wild) and then killed as quickly as possible (even the cruel farmers would tell you it's inefficient to drag the death out for too long), it would go straight for the farm. Wouldn't you?

As for the consumption of the meat once the animal is dead, however it was killed, I have only this to say: that flesh is not an animal. That flesh is meat.

Meat is not alive. It is carbon. It is protein and vitamins and minerals and nothing more. It cannot think. It cannot feel. Even those people who are very religious will likely agree that it does not have a soul, because that soul has already departed.

And most importantly, it will be eaten. If not by a human, than by another animal, or by insects, or by bacteria. In the end, everything is eaten. I will be eaten, and so will you. As time passes, the very same atoms and molecules which made up the animal, and which make up that meat, will go back into the soil after being consumed and processed by some living organism. That soil will eventually become part of a plant which grows there. Carbon will always be recycled, as it always has been since the birth of this planet.

Your vegetables are made out of the very animals you refuse to eat.

Your vegetables are made of meat.